Amex Digital unveils Blu-Ray drive upgrade kit for Mac Mini

This site may earn affiliate commissions from the links on this page. Terms of use.

The rumor cycle leading up to any Apple release often has diverging paths, each of which leads to a rumor that didn’t quite pan out. Apple’s announcement last month of their new updates to their iMac, MacBook, Airport and Mac Mini lines mostly conformed to modest expectations, but one of the diverging rumor paths that ended up leading nowhere was an anticipation of mass Blu-Ray rollout across, at the very least, the iMac line.

That went nowhere, although it’s hard to quite understand why. I suspect the answer is that Apple wants their customers to get their high-definition video content from iTunes, but that’s simply wishful thinking for right now. Sooner or later, Apple’s computers are going to ship with Blu-Ray, even if the high-definition DVD format is, in itself, likely going to become increasingly obsolete as HD video streaming becomes the favored way of absorbing 1080p.

If you really can’t wait to have Blu-Ray on your Mac, though, the aftermarket has you covered. Amex Digital have just unveiled a Blu-Ray drive upgrade kit called the BD-UG1. It’s aimed at the Mac Mini only, and requires some technical know-how to install, but the price isn’t totally outlandish: it only costs $199.

The problem is this: Snow Leopard still doesn’t support Blu-Ray drives, so it’s very unclear whether or not you could actually use the BD-UG1 in OS X. As far as I can tell, you’d need to boot into Windows through Boot Camp or the likes of Parallels, which is clearly a poor solution. No matter how much you want Blu-Ray on your Mac, you’re better holding off for now.